On 8/4/07, GyroTech <gyrotech at freakinabox.com> wrote:
> My reasoning for a hardware RAID card was for thoughput. No mobo I could
> find would have 8 SATA-II ports on it, and I could only really get PCI
> SATA cards, which them severely limits drive performance to the old PCI
> bus speed. That, plus the online RAID level changes ( eg RAID 5 -> 6 )
> and online expansion seemed to make it worthy. It's fully
> hot-swap\hot-spare too, and even has the ability to link up with other
> RAID cards of the same chipset to give even more expansion. Really quite
> funky for less than £200...
There are boards with two 4-port SATA controllers. But how much space
do you need, 4 750G disks in RAID5 gives you 2TB of space. Software
RAID will outperform any hardware RAID you can afford: hardware RAID
controllers in the $200-$400 range don't have enough on-board CPU
power, they are limited to 20-30MB/s. I have a software RAID of 4
Western Digital 750G disks, I get 80MB/s. Linux software RAID supports
growing, and JFS automatically expands to fill all available space on
a partition, so if you ever want to add a disk, you can do it
non-destructively.
--
Fedor G Pikus (fpikus at gmail.com)
http://www.pikus.nethttp://wild-light.com